AMD surpasses Intel in U.S. retail stores

Advanced Micro Devices sold more chips than industry giant Intel in U.S. retail stores in October, according to a report released Tuesday by market researcher Current Analysis.

Desktop computers and notebooks with AMD chips accounted for 49.8 percent of PCs sold in domestic stores for the month, compared with Intel's 48.5 percent of the market, according to the Current Analysis report.

"AMD did the unthinkable by surpassing Intel in October. Continuing to hold this lead in the holiday season would be a colossal win for the company," Matt Sargent, Current Analysis research director, said in a statement.

Last month, AMD's slice of the U.S. retail store pie reached 67.7 percent for desktops, up from 52 percent in September. And its share of the notebook market in that category rose to 31.5 percent in October from 26.2 percent in September.

Although AMD's overall share of the U.S. retail store market surpassed Intel based on units sold, it failed to generate more revenue than the industry giant. Intel chips, which have a higher average selling price, accounted for 57.6 percent of the U.S. retail market in October based on revenue, while AMD lagged at 40.1 percent.

Intel also is still the market leader when factoring in overall PC sales in the U.S., including machines purchased through direct sellers. That top position is bolstered by Intel's exclusive relationship with direct seller Dell, a top supplier of PCs.

Nonetheless, the lead in retail space will help advance AMD toward its long-term goal of 30 percent market share worldwide. AMD currently has approximately 17 percent market share.

Intel's retail slip comes as it copes with other headaches, involving antitrust agencies in foreign countries.

In June, the Korea Fair Trade Commission requested documents relating to the marketing and rebate programs of an Intel foreign subsidiary. And in July, the European Commission raided Intel offices as part of an antitrust investigation.

Why is anyone buying intel desktop chips in the first place? Pay more for hotter, less efficient chips whose performance has lagged behind AMD for the past 2 years. And while Turion is quite as efficient as the Pentium M when it comes to power consumption, you still get more bang for you buck.

I think it will just tame more time for people to realize Intel is not the leader in the market anymore. They are going with the old thought of 'AMD is ahead now, but Intel will come back and get ahead', but will they?I really think the route AMD took with the AMD Athlon 64 secure their spot for a long time to come.They may even maintain it until a desktop version of the Cell chip becomes available. And maybe they can get in on that.

AMD has managed to overcome consumers fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) sowed for years by Intel. The Intel pitch was that if you bought a non-Intel PC it wouldn't run your apps as well, or maybe not at all. Over time, consumers found that AMD computers ran their apps just as well, and for a lot less money. Their friends bought non-Intel machines and didn't go jump off high buildings with buyers remorse. Add to that the success of non-Intel video game boxes, PDAs, and cellphones, and you have the commoditization of the CPU market. From this point forward, Intel is going to have to compete on price, a concept that is as unsettling as it was to AT&#38;T.

Yes, AMD is much better value, you get good hardware that just as good, or perhaps even better for a much smaller price. It's not hard to predict whats going to happen.

Oh and by the way... If Intel has 48.5% and AMD had 49.8%... Who else makes Desktop/Laptop chips? Am I unaware of something?__________________________________R.K.<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.Remove-All-Spyware.com/" target="_newWindow">http://www.Remove-All-Spyware.com/</a>

*VIA, I think they bought out that company that made those Cyrix things. Oddly enough, I do believe I have one around somewhere here that I broke, and also a Cyrix 686 is in use at my office running Win2k... Very slowly. Retro 300mhz chip.

*Transmeta! I heard they hired Linus Torvald for something, that was like ~several~ years ago, and other than that I've never really heard of them doing anything, except for two stories I found that involved someone dumping Transmeta in favor of Intel in one case and AMD in the other.

That's not to say their chips are bad, that's to say that have no publicity and I really have no idea anything ABOUT their chips. They should probably invest more on marketing.

*IBM... They make the PPC chips that go into Apples. However, I don't know if those count into this survey.

Of course, Apples are going to switch to Intel, but that's not a particularly big deal for the chip market overall, since I think Apples account for less than 2% of the total market. Not to say they're bad, I'm just saying not enough people use them to make them a significant force in the market.

If you have the option of hiring some ****** American for 50,000$ a year who dresses like a dork with cheeto-stained pants, or a freakishly smart Indian dude with a tie who charges 15,000$, the choice is clear. It's not even a loss for him; The scale of the economy is different, on his end he's getting equivalant pay.

In cases like this, I say just get up and go elsewhere. That's why we Americans are here in the first place. Europe wasn't working out, so we got up and came here. Traditionally Americans are very mobile anyway, and move every 5 years on average... I think that, ironically, it's actually the American way to get up and go elsewhere.

Personally, I'm moving to Poland, but for unrelated reasons.

Anyway.

I work as an IT admin at my company, and I will tell for 100% certain that no, people don't understand the techo mumbo jumbo about mhz and watts.

The majority of people there - and these are generally smart people - don't know that the picture on the background is called a "wallpaper".

That said, YES, people WILL buy a computer because it says "Intel Inside" and they recall that from a commercial with Blue Man Group and disco dancing dorks in bunny suits.

They will also buy a computer because someone is selling it to them, and it's a good deal and it's what they want, and it happens to feature an Intel CPU and they have no idea what that means.

They don't care, and frankly, really don't need to. For the majority of people, the difference is negligable. The loser in these situations is the company trying to compete on end-price when production cost are higher, not the user who wants to run Microsoft Word, which does the same thing now as it did on a 50mhz 486.

The markets where the chip really matters are things like servers, cluster based HPC and gaming, and these are markets where people tend to know what they want.

The are hiring people in The Republic of Panama (Panama Canal Area) for 6,000$ a year. That's equal to 8 reps for 1 in the US, they do the same job for Latin-American costumers and US costumers that does not speak English. So it's all about saving a few bucks on the operational costs. And the quality of their job is even better!!!

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